Memories of the 28th Century

In the course of reciting the dogmas of AGW, someone used the phrase "settled science" in regard to the theory that global warming has been caused by human activity. I foolishly started wondering what science is settled. There are matters that nearly everyone agrees on that might be called "settled", but when you scratch the surface there are questions.

There aren't many people who don't believe the theory of gravity. Newton's law of universal gravitation states that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton...al_gravitation But there are signs that there is an opposing force acting against gravity, and it messes up the results. I'm not saying that gravity doesn't work; it's a lot more complicated than that. And dark matter and dark energy make things more difficult. The subatomic particle related to gravity was predicted a long time ago, but it has not yet been detected. Well, this should have been settled science, but it isn't.

Then there's the matter of the speed of light in a vacuum. Einstein set that as an axiom to his theory of Special Relativity, and people started taking that assumption as fact, but it isn't necessarily true, and it certainly is not settled science. http://www.iflscience.com/physics/sp...an-vary-vacuum There is a lot more doubt and lack of settlement in regard to Einstein's theories, but it wasn't really the theories that are uncertain as much as it is doubt about his assumptions.

Even in the matter about which Gore was speaking doubt has crowded up against settled science. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6169/379.full But we already knew that.

Science casts doubt on all sorts of things. I remember hearing something about there being doubt as whether such airplanes get lift by there being low air pressure above the wings. That was settled decades ago, but it's more complicated than that. This article tries to straighten things out, but I'm not completely sure that it does. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/wrong1.html

So when does science become "settled? If science did become "settled", then the scientists would be able to show, in an organized and scientific way, without any disputed facts that their assertion(s) were fact. Apparently, the climate scientists have trouble with that, because whenever the climate science people are presented with a dispute to their ideas they throw up claims that the disputer is denying science. If the science is real and indisputable, then let's see it. The attempts that I have seen that were intended to prove that global warming was caused by human activity have large holes in them, and some of the alleged data has been fabricated. http://illinoisfamily.org/marriage/w...w-you-can-too/

Scientists in other disciplines don't paint themselves into corners. Real scientists are willing to publish and take the heat from everyone who thinks they are crazy. Criticism is part of how things, scientific and other, come to be well understood. The scientist will publish. The critics will poke holes in that. The scientist will rewrite either explaining criticisms away or incorporating them into the work, then he will publish again and wait for the critics. String Theory is an excellent of a scientific theory that has been around for a few decades and criticized to the point where no one fully backs it, but there are features of it that are accepted.

Another example is the Theory of Plate Tectonics. Schiller first published on plate tectonics in 1912, but the theory was largely derided for decades. It was only in the 1950's that it came to be widely accepted.

Yet another example relates to the Sunspot Cycle. Sunspots were noticed centuries ago, and the cycles of high and low points in the cycle were noted. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age correlated with an extremely low number of Sunspots, the Maunder Minimum.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum


In a more general way, is science ever "settled"? There may be some bits of science that are settled, but I don't believe that the nature of science and the scientific method are such that any question is ever completely closed, except by people who are too lazy to question their own beliefs. While there is a general consensus among climatologists that the Earth has been on a warming trend since the Little Ice Age ended, that's about as far as it goes. People in that field are more accustomed to dealing with uncertainty than are most people.

Religions have dogmas, while science has principles and laws and theories. Religions put their money on one bet and leave it there. Science looks at probabilities and bets the most on the most likely results but puts something on the longshots also and moves bets or makes new ones, when new information is learned.

Religion is a settled matter, but science is open to change when new information comes along. People who think that any matter in science is "settled" aren't talking about science. People who aren't willing to learn new things, well, I should stop before I get too nasty. (That was hard.)




http://bigthink.com/think-tank/10-ex...-controversial

Doubt as to AGW
http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/cooglobwrm.pdf